<i>Instead, the greatest value will be in second-generation applications that provide total recall and augmented cognition. Imagine being able to call up (and share) everything you have ever seen, or read the transcripts for every conversation you ever had, alongside the names and faces of everyone you ever met. Imagine having supplemental contextual information relayed to you automatically so you could win any argument or impress your date.</i><p>This is the common wearable computing utility argument, but in practice, it doesn't seem to pan out.<p>Gordon Bell digitized much of his life, and everything for the past ten or twenty years. Phone calls, emails, a photo every sixty seconds, more when his heart rate increased. He hardly ever went back to it. Revisiting it was so rare as to be a notable event in and of itself. Rather, he found people with whom he had conversations would go to him and use him as a reference library.<p>Bradley Rhodes' Remembrance Agent was an Emacs thing which actively indexed and cross-referenced anything you were typing with things you had written before. He's working on Glass now, afaik: <a href="http://www.remem.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.remem.org/</a> It isn't a generally useful solution because it requires that you live inside of Emacs. Today you'd need something that could index across multiple devices, multiple independent cloud storage systems, multiple independent accounts, etc.; or something that was locked into a single ecosystem and you lived entirely there, but then you'd develop "blind spots" for things that occurred elsewhere, like how you stop hanging out with certain friends because the only way they communicate with you is via Facebook but you turned off all of Facebook's notifications.<p>There was an essay a long time ago, a writer had been filing every link and every note into a pre-Evernote piece of notetaking/hyperlinking/PIM software, something with an X or a Z in the name, but I can't recall it or the piece. The essay was about an article he was writing during which the software brought up a saved article and a note he had written, and forgotten about, in a creepily timely and seemingly prescient moment. He wondered at what point the software needs to get credit for providing the research and the associations.<p>"Forgetting" is a key part of human existence that most wearable applications tend to ignore. "You were last here with [your ex]" says Foursquare. "You haven't talked with [your ex] in a while, make her day by leaving a message on her wall" says Facebook. Using someone's precise words against them can be emotionally cruel. Legally, you're expected to forget all of the specific details of things like trade secrets and company processes when you leave a job; how is that to be reconciled with your perfect, digital memory? None of these things are being actively explored.<p>We already hit the "second generation" of applications as described by the author; it's the third generation that interests me.